Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  They walked from near Hiroshima Station through Inari-chō, Kamiya-chō, Ōte-machi, and Senda-machi, followed all the way by the heat from the smoldering fires, by the stench of corpses, by the cries of the dying. The water in their flasks was soon exhausted and, far from rescuing others, they soon found themselves seeking hither and thither among the burned-out ruins for some place of refuge. After about two hours of such wandering, Tabuchi suddenly realized that all but two of his companions had drifted away from him. They had failed to find a single pupil from the Miyoshi Girls’ High School. One of his companions was tottering along half fainting, so they made their way to an acquaintance’s at Gion outside the city, which they reached about four-thirty. They rested there for about four hours, and it was not until eight-thirty in the evening that the three of them bestirred themselves and, exhausted though they were, set off home. They were more tired than they could remember ever having been before. They walked from Gion to Shimo-Fukagawa in about three hours, and spent the night in the waiting room there. The next morning around six, they boarded a train jammed with refugees and returned home.

  They discovered later that all the pupils from the Miyoshi Girls’ High School who had been in Hiroshima doing war work had perished; ninety percent of the other people from Miyoshi and its neighborhood were either killed outright or died before the year was out. Tabuchi himself had wandered around the ruins for something over two hours, and I hear that he is now suffering from a mild case of radiation disease.

  In Miyoshi, the hills must have cut off the view of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. In Mihara, a city over seventy miles from Hiroshima but with only low hills to the west, it was visible.)

  The same three women told my wife and niece various other curious things about the stricken city. The wooden bridges in the affected area had almost all been completely consumed by fire, but the way they burned was most remarkable. The planks, first of all, would start smoldering. Then, when they had gone, the fire would spread to the piers underneath. As the tide went out and the water level fell, these piers would gradually smolder away farther and farther down. The strange thing was that though the next high tide ought, in theory, to have put the fire out, the next morning found it smoldering again, so that little by little all the timber was eventually consumed.

  At the cemetery at the Kokutaiji Temple, there was a grave where a piece of brick about three inches square had been caught between the square stone base and the stone cylinder that rested on it. The cylinder, which was all of three feet six inches in diameter, must have been lifted up by the blast and, at precisely that instant, a fragment of brick must have come flying through the air and wedged itself in the gap thus formed. The gravestone, which was of smooth-polished granite, was burned raw and rough on the side which had faced the flash, but was as smooth as ever on the side that had been turned away from it. Even granite had been affected like this; ordinary roof tiles exposed to the flash had been transformed from dark gray into a reddish-brown color, and actually had eruptions like small bubbles on their surface. The effect was rather like the texture produced by firing a piece of Koimbe ware in a kiln.

  Another story had apparently been told by a first-class private in the engineers when he had stopped for water at a farmhouse in the village of Ōga, on his way to the temporary reception center for victims at Hesaka. The engineers, he said, had lost such enormous numbers of men through the bomb that they were stacking the bodies crisscross on top of each other on the sandy shoals in the river that ran from Hakushima, and setting fire to them. The fires were kept burning even at night, with a guard stationed there to keep watch over them. “Corpse duty,” as it was called, was heartily loathed by everybody. Ever since the bomb fell, they said, the army’s lines of command had been badly disrupted; discipline had deteriorated, and some officers were beginning to be afraid of their men.

  —

  It was Yasuko, for the most part, who related these stories to me. Shigeko, who had griping pains in the stomach as a result of over-immersion in the river, said very little. Both of them had had nothing but towels around their waists as they squatted in the shallow part of the river while their underwear dried.

  It was already quite dark when the old father of the owner of the house came to tell us that the electric lights would go on. The power supply had started again that day.

  August 10. Fine.

  Yasuko and Shigeko fetched our breakfast from the dormitory kitchen, then shaped some of the boiled barley-and-bran mix into “rice cakes” to take with them, and set off for the city. I went with them as far as the station. In the station there were many people who, so far as I could tell, were neither waiting for someone nor buying tickets, but had simply drifted into the waiting room for want of somewhere else to go. When the train arrived a number of them simply stood there without moving, and some of them were sprawled out on the benches again when it left. There were other people asking the station officials how best to set about finding lost children.

  I left the station and went back to the company, where I found urgent business awaiting me. I must arrange to secure some coal, and this would necessitate going either to Hiroshima or to Ujina. Mr. Fujita brought a large bundle from an adjoining room. “I hate to bother you,” he said, “but I’d like you to get something done about it as soon as possible. The things you’ll need in the ruins are in this bundle. Be careful, now—there may be another raid.”

  I left a message with him for Shigeko. Then I got my air raid hood and a first-aid outfit, shouldered the bundle and set off.

  The train took me as far as Yamamoto Station. From here on, services were still interrupted. None of the passengers, fifty or sixty altogether, left the station when we arrived; instead, they set off walking in single file along the tracks towards Hiroshima. The people of Hiroshima are noted for their sociability, but today each of us paced steadily ahead, treading from one railway tie to the next, without exchanging a single word. The only people carrying anything on their backs apart from myself were two women in baggy breeches immediately ahead of me. Less than a quarter of them were carrying anything resembling a packed meal; nothing could have demonstrated so vividly the shortage of goods that affected even the farming villages near the town. How many similar silent parties, I wondered, did the train unload every day into the burned-out ruins of Hiroshima?

  As we finally came into the ruined area a dank, malodorous breeze came blowing across the empty waste. One by one, the people walking with us dropped out of file, until eventually only a handful were left going in the same direction as myself. By now, all about was a waste of broken tiles, the road a heavily pitted desert.

  I had crossed a bridge when it occurred to me to wonder just where I was. I looked back, and recognized the arched iron framework that had survived the flames: Yokogawa Bridge. Near here, as I had passed along the same road on my way out of the city on the sixth, I had seen three women, almost completely naked, dead in a water tank that stood by the roadside about eight-tenths full. I determined to keep my eyes averted as I passed it, but for all my resolution it was inevitable, perhaps, that I should steal a glance. A length of more than three feet of large intestine had sprouted from the buttocks of one of the women, who floated upside down; it was swollen to about three inches in diameter, and floated in a slightly tangled ring on the water, swaying gently from side to side like a balloon as the wind blew.

  On the burned-out site of one of the temples in Tera-machi, I saw a plank propped up with an inscription, written in charcoal, saying “Nekoya-chō Reception Center for Corpses.” Inside the clay wall, I could see a pile about six feet high of dead bodies. Some looked as though they had been crushed to death, some were half consumed by fire, some were mere bones. The clay wall had collapsed in places, and so long as one had one’s eyes open the corpses came into one’s field of vision whether one willed it or not. The mound of corpses was black with swarming flies. As I watched, something—the breeze, perhaps—disturbed them, and they starte
d up with a loud buzzing, only to cluster round the corpses again almost immediately. At the same time, a stifling, penetrating odor that stung at the nose and throat assailed my nostrils. Holding my breath, I made off at a trot. After a while, I slowed down to a normal pace and walked with a cotton towel over my nose, but still the stench that came following after me was enough to make my head reel.

  Once I emerged from the ruins of Tera-machi, the smell abated somewhat. It was only a moment’s respite, though, and as the number of corpses and skeletons by the roadside increased I was enveloped once more in a vile stench. I was in hell, a hell that tortured with omnipresent, inescapable odor. The one place where it seemed to lessen somewhat was on Aioi Bridge, where a breeze was blowing from the river. Heaving a breath of relief, I propped my load against the stone rampart and took a rest.

  Since the city had been almost entirely razed to the ground by the fire, one could take in the distant view at a glance. To the south, I could see the dark grayish-green hills of Ōkawa-chō. To the southwest, the unspoilt woods of Mukai-Ujina and, directly opposite, Shumi-yama at Miyajima; to the west, the low eminence of Eba; and to the east the sacred hill of the Tōshōgū Shrine. Nothing stood on the scorched waste at the center of the city save the skeletons of a few buildings; apart from these, the only thing that met the eye was a litter of carbonized timbers and fragments of tile. The occasional black or white speck moving in the wilderness would be a human being—searching, as likely as not, for the remains of a relative or a friend. It was a scene of unremitting desolation.

  At one end of the bridge, a body lay face up with its arms stretched out wide. Its face was black and discolored, yet from time to time it seemed to puff its cheeks out and take a deep breath. Its eyelids seemed to be moving, too. I stared in disbelief. Balancing my bundle on the parapet, I approached the corpse in fear and trembling—to find swarms of maggots tumbling from the mouth and nose and crowding in the eye sockets; it was nothing but their wriggling, that first impression of life and movement.

  Suddenly, a phrase from a poem came back to me, a poem I had read in some magazine when I was a boy: “Oh worm, friend worm!” it began. There was more in the same vein: “Rend the heavens, burn the earth, and let men die! A brave and moving sight!”

  Fool! Did the poet fancy himself as an insect, with his prating of his “friend” the worm? How idiotic can you get? He should have been here at 8:15 on August 6, when it had all come true: when the heavens had been rent asunder, the earth had burned, and men had died. “Revolting man!” I found myself announcing quite suddenly to no one in particular. “ ‘Brave and moving,’ indeed!” For a moment, I felt like flinging my bundle in the river. I hated war. Who cared, after all, which side won? The only important thing was to end it all soon as possible: rather an unjust peace, than a “just” war!

  I went back to the parapet, but instead of flinging my bundle into the river made it fast on my back. It was full of things necessary for survival amidst the ruins: a bottle containing stomach pills, a trowel, old magazines, eucalyptus leaves, dried rusks, a round paper fan, and the like.

  Nearing Kamiya-chō, I came upon a number of men who looked like soldiers. With gauze masks over their mouths and noses, they were tending to three or four fires which they had built in separate places. As I drew nearer, I saw that they had made the fires in holes about six feet square dug in the ground, and were fetching corpses and throwing them in the flames. For fuel, they were using old railway ties, and the crackling of the ties as they burned gave the pyres an added touch of horror beneath the blazing sun. I looked, and from the trunks of the bodies could see pale blue, slender flames rising, to be caught up at once in the fierce red flames leaping higher all about them.

  Body after body the soldiers brought, on door panels and sheets of corrugated iron, to fling them unceremoniously, face up, into the flames before trudging off silently on their next mission. They had bent up the corners of the corrugated iron sheets for ease in carrying. They must have been working under orders from a superior officer; whatever emotions they felt, their expressions gave no clue. The only sign of feeling seemed to be in their military boots, which were slow-moving and leaden. When there were so many bodies in a pit that the flames died down, they would dump the bodies they brought on the ground by the edge. Sometimes, the jolt would bring a mass of maggots and liquid corruption gushing from the corpse’s mouth. When a body was dumped too close to the fire, the heat would bring the maggots wriggling out in panic all over it. And occasionally the shock of hitting the ground would do something to the joints of a corpse, so that it reminded me of Pinocchio, in the children’s tale, with all the pins removed from his wooden limbs. If even Pinocchio, poor plaything of wood and metal pins, was supposed to have felt pain in his own wooden way when he barked his shin against something, what of these the dead, who had once been human beings?

  “These stiffs are getting out of hand,” muttered the soldier at the front end of a piece of corrugated iron.

  “If only we’d been born in a country, not a damn-fool state,” said his companion wistfully.

  That exchange was the only human sound I heard there. The body on the improvised stretcher lay in a tight huddle, a Pinocchio with every single pin removed…

  All unconsciously, I had started murmuring the “Sermon on Mortality” to myself. Hiroshima was no more….Yet who could have foreseen that its end would be of such horror as this?

  CHAPTER 12

  A jabbing pain in the stomach forced me to seat myself on some stone steps, heedless of the thick layer of ash settled on them. It was a dry, powdery ash like buckwheat flour. Dabbing at it with my finger, I found I could draw scrolls and write letters in it. I wrote all kinds of things. I visualized the blackboard at school in my childhood, and started to draw the diagram for Pythagoras’s theorem, but gave up halfway.

  After a while, the griping pain eased up. I turned around to see where I was, and found it was the front entrance of the city hall, littered now with pieces of charred timbers lying here, there, and everywhere. It was a desolate sight: the outer wall, a tasteful shade of cream until only the other day, was burned to a grayish-brown, and all the window frames, not to speak of the windows themselves, were gone. In the corridor leading from the entrance to the back of the building, pieces of steel scrap that might have been broken helmets were lying about the floor. The building, of course, was a desolate, gutted ruin, but at the back I could hear a noise as of empty boxes or something being dragged about the floor. Pricking up my ears to catch the sound, I began to fancy that it was welling up from under the ground.

  Feeling suddenly uneasy, I shouldered my rucksack again. Just then, I was surprised to hear someone call my name: “Mr. Shizuma! Where are you going?”

  It was Mr. Tashiro, an elderly technologist from the Ujina canning factory.

  “Mr. Tashiro! It’s good to see you. What do you think that noise is?”

  “It’s the municipal workers clearing away the charred timbers. You’ve burned your face, I see. What happened to your family?”

  “They’re safe, thank you. What’s your firm doing for coal? I’m supposed to go to the Coal Control Corporation, but I’ve not the faintest idea where it is.”

  “They’ve had it, the same as everybody else. I don’t even know where the employees have gone to. So I tried coming to the city hall.”

  The Ujina cannery was under the jurisdiction of the Provisions Depot, and like us supplied part of its products to the Clothing Depot, but even so it was having trouble getting coal. According to Mr. Tashiro, more than twenty employees were already doing business at the city hall under the general direction of Deputy Mayor Shibata, but they had refused to accept any petitions concerning the coal ration. Since coal was under the jurisdiction of the Coal Control Corporation, the only outcome if the city hall meddled with it would be a reprimand from the military, and things would become more complicated than ever.

  “So the upshot is that I’ve come to the city
hall to complain,” Tashiro said.

  Whatever happened, I would have to make a report to the manager, so I asked Tashiro to take me to the site of the Coal Control Corporation offices. As chief technologist at the Ujina cannery, the old man was well versed in matters concerning coal, and was on close terms with the head of the corporation.

  “But you know,” said Tashiro as we walked, “it puzzles me why an important place like a control corporation still hasn’t put up a notice saying where it’s moved to. There must be some explanation for it, don’t you think?”

  At the former site of the control corporation, we found all kinds of messages written up on a piece of concrete wall that had been left standing—but, as Tashiro had said, nothing from the corporation itself.

  They were written in every kind of writing, from the careless scrawl to the well-formed hand. “Mr. Fujino,” one message said, “please inform address—Mikkaichi Iron Foundry.” “Please leave temporary address of your corporation here—Nakabayashi, Sankyō Co.” “Mr. Honda: Are you all right? Please leave your present address—Tsutsuki Works, Kaitaichi.” “Mr. Murano: Please write your address here—Uchiyama, Koi.” All the messages used pieces of charcoal from half-burned timbers, and all gave the date.